Skin by Mo Hayder
‘Sir?’
Flea might have said something else to Caffery that day. She might have said a little more and things might have panned out very differently if at that moment Stuart Pearce, the rolypoly search adviser who’d ordered the quarry search, hadn’t interrupted them.
‘Sir? Sir? I’d like a word.’
They both turned to watch him come across the car park, smiling at Caffery, his finger held up in the air as if he was making a point. He stopped a few feet away, breathing hard from the exertion. He had a soft face and a thick, sunburnt neck. His hair was combed across his balding pate. He addressed Caffery, acting as if Flea didn’t exist. ‘You’re the SIO, are you, sir?’
‘No – he’s gone. Wells station. You’ll catch him there in about ten.’ Caffery started to turn away, but Pearce wasn’t going to be put off.
‘Is it Lucy Mahoney in there?’ He gestured at the coroner’s van pulling out of the car park.
‘Who wants to know?’
He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a business card. ‘I was the search adviser on her disappearance. Today’s my rest day but I thought I’d better come in when I heard they’d found someone.’
That figured, she thought. He was the type: an officer freshly trained in a new job, full of enthusiasm, such a need to be involved that he’d turn up on rest days probably for no pay. All because he liked the glory. He was the sort who’d accidentally let his warrant card drop out of his wallet on to the bar when he was trying to pull someone. Thought women were more likely to open their legs for a cop.
‘You can see, can’t you, now that you’ve got the lie of the land, how I would never have put this place on my search parameters? I’d never have found her with what I had to go on – it was like a needle in a haystack.’
‘Don’t waste your breath, mate,’ said Caffery. ‘I’m just floating here. It’s not mine, it’s F District’s. I’m MCIU.’
‘MCIU?’
‘Major Crime.’
‘Yes. I know what MCIU is.’ He wiped his forehead. ‘You must be doing the Kitson case, then. I was the search adviser on that too, before the review got it bumped up to you from District.’
Bloody celebrity junkie, Flea thought. People like Pearce loved the media scrums that the Kitson case was attracting, the spotlight on the force. God, she didn’t like the guy. The more he talked, the more he ignored her, the more the fuses popped in her head.
‘I heard you got a fix on her phone from the Macrocell base station?’ he said. ‘Used that call analysis team, right?’
‘You’ve had your ear to the ground, then,’ said Caffery.
‘That mast was in the parameters I drew up, but it wasn’t a good area – not well covered by masts.’ Pearce put his hands on his hips and, head back, gazed out across the trees. Then he squinted in the other direction, at the horizon. ‘Somewhere like this would have been better. If Misty Kitson was out on that railway line we’d have got a fix on her in no time. But her phone was switched off, wasn’t it?’
‘Whose?’ Flea could hear irritation creeping into Caffery’s voice.
‘Lucy Mahoney’s. It was switched off, District told me. Bizarre, if you ask me – usually suicides use their phones. Make last-minute calls, even just to hear someone speak, or texts before they pull the plug. You can see why my job was difficult, can’t you? She broke all the rules.’
‘What rules?’
‘All the geographical profiling rules, everything. To start off, look how far away her car is – she had to walk half a mile to get here. Why didn’t she park nearer?’
‘She was wandering? Distressed?’
‘Nah. Suicides generally know where they’re going to do it before they set out. And, anyway, I spoke to the ex-husband and he said she doesn’t know this area. She never walked her dog here or anything like that. There was nothing connecting her to this place. I mean, most suicides are less than half a mile from a road, and she must be topping that, surely? And they go somewhere high, suicides. They go and sit somewhere – somewhere they can see lights, buildings, so they can see what they’re saying goodbye to. But not her. You can’t see a thing from that embankment. I’ve been over there. Had a look.’
Flea’d had enough. She stepped forward. Hand up. Big smile on her face. ‘Hi.’ Her best, brightest voice. Waved the hand for good measure. ‘Remember me? Sergeant Marley? The one who did most of your searching?’
He gave her a cool look. ‘Yes.’
‘We dived the quarry yesterday. You missed it.’
‘I was looking at other possible sites.’
He turned back to Caffery, but she’d started now and she wouldn’t stop until she’d got in his face. ‘Yeah, well. Don’t worry about it. I didn’t think she’d be in there anyway.’
‘Of course not,’ he said quietly, his eyes still on Caffery, ‘because you’re psychic.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You knew she wouldn’t be in the quarry. So you must be psychic.’
She started to laugh, but stopped when she saw the look on his face. ‘What did you say?’
‘I’ve had to come in on my rest day for this. And it doesn’t help when whatever blood, sweat and tears you throw at it, whatever profiles, Blue 8 mapping you generate, some people still won’t believe you. This is the second time you’ve undermined my authority.’
She knew what he was talking about, of course: earlier this week she and Pearce had got into what Wellard called ‘a full and frank discussion’ about whether the team should be searching for Misty Kitson in a lake near the rehab clinic. Flea hadn’t thought Kitson would be found in the lake and she’d told Pearce so. She probably hadn’t done it in the sweetest way imaginable either. ‘Misty Kitson again?’
‘You decided she wasn’t going to be in the lake either. Didn’t you? A bit dispiriting, that – being told I was wrong before you’d even finished the search.’
‘I was right, though, wasn’t I? She wasn’t there. You get an instinct after a while. She was never going to be in the lake. She was never going to drown herself, a girl like that.’
‘You’re going to tell me the lottery numbers next.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I can’t reason with you so I think I’m finished here.’ She put her arm out, gesturing for Pearce to stand back so she could pass, but he didn’t move, didn’t meet her eyes. She tried to go round him the other way but he shifted his boxy body a little, hemming her in. He held Caffery’s eyes while he did it, a half-smile on his face.
She stopped and raised her eyes to his. ‘You know what?’ She was calm. ‘It’s been years since I got my hair off over a case like Kitson just because the victim was a celeb. You know why?’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’d be just a little bit afraid someone would turn around and call me an effing media monkey. Now,’ she paused, breathing hard, ‘are you going to step out of my way, you combed-over old twonk? Or do I have to push you?’
Pearce’s nostrils widened a tiny amount. There was a moment when she thought he might just take his life into his hands and stand his ground. But in the end he hadn’t the balls. He rubbed his nose and stepped out of her way.
She made a small, victorious noise in her throat, slung the towel over her back, turned and trudged back to the unit van. Bloody Newbs. Probably moved up from the Specials, that one. She just didn’t have the patience.
‘Marley,’ Caffery called. But she raised her hand, goodbye, and continued to where the team were throwing the last few pieces into the van. She got into the Focus, started the engine and pulled out on to the road. The sun was beating down on the windscreen, making patterns in the dust. As the car park disappeared in her rear-view mirror she allowed herself to smile.
Do I have to push you, you combed-over old twonk?
Good one, girl. She jacked up the volume on the end of that Arctic Monkeys CD. She liked the way Caffery had looked at her breasts. As if the T-shirt wasn’t even there. As if he could see right through it,
She laughed and opened the window. Combed-over old twonk. Yeah. She was proud of that one. Really proud.
9
Back at base everyone was hot and tired. And they still couldn’t get rid of the smell. Even after they’d showered and showered, decontaminated the suits over and over again, shoved their underclothing into airtight sacks, even after all that, somehow, it seemed to linger. Flea wasn’t even sure she couldn’t smell it on her clothing when she got into the car to go home. She sat at red traffic lights and wafted the neck of her T-shirt. Bent her face down for a sniff test.
It was hard and cold and lonely to think of a woman’s life reduced to this: a smell other people struggled to wash away. There had been days, especially when she’d first started in the unit, when every dead body she handled took something vital out of her. But she’d grown more pragmatic over the years and today she put the thought of Lucy Mahoney away easily and drove with the window open, the countryside flying past. The phone sat in the central console. Caffery’s mobile number was in its contacts list. She could call him any time. She could just pick up the phone and call.
By the time she got home to the house she’d grown up in, high on a hill overlooking the distant city of Bath, she was hungry. A long time had rolled past since breakfast. She parked on the gravel and climbed out, automatically going to the back to put her kit holdall in the boot for the next morning. But as she aimed the key at the lock she remembered: the boot was stuck. It had been like this for four days, ever since Thom had borrowed the car the night he had come home drunk. The lock made an odd little electronic bleep and seemed to click open, but when she tried to lift it, it jammed. She put the key in and turned it. Again it clicked. And again she couldn’t open it.
Swearing now, she dropped the holdall in the gravel, squatted at eye level to the lock and saw what was jamming it. A piece of material was trapped in the latch. She gave it a tug, thinking somehow she’d shut her overalls in it, but the fabric was wrong: it was soft, velvety, not slick. She tipped back on her haunches, puzzled. Running her fingers over it, she tried to remember what she’d put in here. And then she noticed something that made everything go into slow motion.
The smell.
She stared at the lock. Sniffed the air. Now she thought about it, the car had smelt this morning on her way to work. Yesterday too. Maybe the stench in the offices hadn’t been the team’s fault at all. Maybe they’d cleaned the equipment properly. Her car had been parked near the air-conditioning unit. This smell could have been sucked into the building from the boot.
Four nights ago Thom had taken the car to a meeting.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, she thought. Thom? You were upset that night. Too upset. Was it really just the drinking and the police car you trailed in with you?
She straightened. Stepped away from the car. Scanned the garden, the driveway. Her parents’ house was on a remote hillside, but there were neighbours, the Oscars, who often watched her from their windows high above the driveway. There was no one at them today, though. Lucky. Head down, she went to the garage door and threw it open. Then she went back to the car and swung herself into the driver’s seat. Inside, the smell came back at her. How the hell had she missed it all this time?
She spun the car round under the huge wall of the Oscars’ house and reversed into the garage, spraying gravel everywhere. The garage was a triple one, but even when her parents had been alive no one had ever parked in it. Instead the walls were lined with the family’s detritus: old lawnmowers, a Victorian cast-iron bath, rusting shears, a freezer, a rolled-up tent and some of her father’s old diving cylinders propped in a row in the corner. There was just enough space to squeeze in the Focus. Its exhaust filled the place, poisoned the air.
She killed the engine, got out and slammed down the garage door, then slid across the interior bolts – rusty because no one had ever used them. Among a pile of tools near the door was a jemmy. She took it to the car and inserted it carefully under the lock, then paused, half of her not wanting to know. Taking a deep breath through her mouth she leant on the handle. The lid flew open with a rush of stinking air. Inside was a bloated corpse.
‘Shit.’ She slammed the lid shut and took a step back. Dropped the jemmy with a clatter. ‘Shit.’ She put her hands into the air and stared at the boot, breathing hard. What the hell had Thom done?
She clenched her fists. Unclenched them. She grabbed the jemmy from the floor and popped the boot again, keeping well back when it opened.
It was a woman. She lay on her side with her left arm squashed under her, the right elbow over her face at an unnatural angle. She was dressed in a purple velvet coat, a neon-green dress belted at the waist. The four days of being cooked and simmered by the sun on the car had made her limbs swell fat and shiny, enough for the straps on her high-heeled silver sandals to have disappeared into the flesh. From the small part of her face that was visible Flea could see her eyes and lips protruding. Mottled, like a frog’s.
She shut the boot and went shakily into the house through the side door, kicked it closed and sank to the floor, her back against the wall. She put her arms on to her knees and dropped her face, staring blankly at her legs in the dark blue trousers. This was insanity. It was insanity.
After a while she got to her feet and went around the rooms, gathering things in her arms until she’d found everything she needed: brown paper, tape, one of the facemasks her team sometimes used for body recovery, and the blue inner gloves she wore for diving polluted water.
Back in the garage – the smell was unbearable now and already a few flies were circling the boot – she stood on a box and taped brown paper to the windows, sealing them carefully so no one could stand on tiptoe and stare in. Then she pulled on her gloves and facemask and went back to the boot. She stopped to take a few deep breaths and wipe her head with her forearm, then opened it again.
The body was still there. Yeah, right. Like it might have got up and left? She stepped nearer. Forced herself to look. Her breathing was loud in the facemask.
The woman didn’t seem very old – mid-twenties maybe, with nicely manicured nails, highlighted hair and expensive gold hoops in her ears. Her arm was dropped across one as if she was trying to shield herself. The coat lay across the lock, part of it jammed into the mechanism. Flea looked hard at it, wondering if there was something important about it. Where had she seen it before? One of Thom’s girlfriends, maybe?
She lifted the woman’s elbow, careful not to disturb the clothing. No injuries to this side of the face. There was a long graze on the underside of the arm. With her index finger pressing the facemask tight to her nose, she bent, squinting at the graze. Something was embedded in the skin. Something dark and hard, like small stones. Or tarmac. An idea began to work in the back of her head.
Lowering the woman’s arm carefully she went to the front of the car. The Focus had belonged to her parents – their priorities in life had had everything to do with experiencing the world and nothing to do with nice-looking cars: it was battered and well used. But now, and she crouched next to the headlamp to be sure, she was pretty certain this dent hadn’t been there before Thom had borrowed it.
She studied it carefully. She’d seen a lot of road crashes. Only last month she’d been woken at two in the morning to cut a body out of a car wreck: a thirty-six-year-old mother of three had impaled her car on a motorway barrier. She was alive and unhurt, talking to everyone on the scene, but stuck in the car like a pig in a poke. The fire that had started in the engine had cooked her alive. Flea had been the one who had pulled out her skinless corpse and put it into the coroner’s van. No one said the obvious, that she looked like an anatomy lesson with all her musculature so exposed. Yes, what a car could do to a human body was something she knew a bit about. And what a human body could do to a car – she knew a bit abou
She straightened and went to the other side of the Focus, checking along the sills and the doors for anything unfamiliar. She studied the bonnet, the wheels, the windows, careful not to touch. Then she stood on tiptoe, and immediately saw what she was searching for. There was a crumpled area about two foot in diameter on the roof just above the driver’s seat, with a small crescent of blood caked on it. A picture was forming of the way a body could fly into the air, cartwheel through the moonlight, bounce on a roof and land on the road, tarmac and grit scraping itself into the skin. Thom had been drunk that night.
She went back to the boot and put her hands into the pockets of the woman’s dress. Empty. The coat pockets too. Then her hands closed around something else, wedged just under the woman’s hips. It was crackly and cool against Flea’s gloved fingertips. Turning her face away because each time she moved the body a waft of decomposition came into her face, she gripped the object between thumb and forefinger and tugged gently. Surprisingly, it came away easily, dragging briefly against the clothing and popping out so fast it almost made her take a step backwards.
It was a handbag, sewn intricately with large, faceted sequins dangling and catching the light. Something about the design, the natural fabric at its base, told her it was expensive. Flea opened the clasp and peered in.
Most of the things inside it were cosmetics. She laid them carefully on the garage floor: a tube of Benefit concealer with a picture of a fifties girl on a telephone, a sachet of Hard Candy body shimmer, a stick of Chanel lipstick, colour ‘Boudoir’ – things Flea could never have afforded, even if she’d wanted them. Deeper in the bag was a compact Tampax tampon wrapped in green plastic, a half-finished blister pack of paracetamol, some banknotes folded into a diamanté clip. She put everything on the floor and ran a gloved finger through the rest of the bag. There was a handful of change but otherwise nothing. Just a few coppers and a bit of dust. No ID.
She was replacing everything in the bag when something made her stop. It was the diamanté clip. On one side it was straight but on the reverse side the diamanté was formed into a single letter. She stared at it. It was an M.